I recently got involved in a couple of discussions on the Site Point Forums about how useful Paid Search (PPC) is in advertising a web business and if it should be trusted at all given click fraud and some of the other concerns that continue to come up. Having worked with search for years and seeing tremendous returns, the answer for me was obvious - of course you should use search. However, in discussing the issue more, I've realized it's really not that simple of a question - search marketing can have great results but it also has requirements to work. So if you aren't running a fortune 500 company with a search agency or web team, should you even bother trying? And if you do decide to get into the mix, what do you need to do?
Before you start considering any sort of advertising campaign I'd challenge you to answer this single question - do you have the time to manage your campaign and if not, will you put the resources into getting someone else to do it? Most of the time business owners are doing a hundred different jobs and adding one more may seem like a longer day but if that one job is managing a marketing campaign, think twice. Unless you're willing to set aside a good chunk of time to properly learn about and manage a campaign, I'd suggest you maintain only the smallest of presence - anything bigger and you're setting yourself up to waste money. Success in marketing comes from putting in the time to build and improve things, and that doesn't stop after the campaign gets off the ground, it's an ongoing struggle.
So if you don't have time what then? Are you completely out of luck? Of course not. Businesses need to advertise and not having the time to manage it yourself makes you more common than you may think which is why there are thousands of companies that will manage search campaigns of just a few hundred dollars up to thousands of dollars per day, hour, even per minute. There are people who can help you.
Search marketing isn't all that different from traditional marketing campaigns except that unlike with TV, radio or print, there tends to be a lot more places to measure things and to optimize. Some people refer to this optimization process as something for "data geeks" and to some degree that's true - there's a lot of data and it requires time to review. Not interested in data? Again, if you aren't willing to put the time in, don't expect to make a big return. But if you made it this far you're serious about understanding the requirements, so let's continue.
In your search campaign there are 3 main elements you'll need to optimize: (1) the search listings and bids, (2) the pages people go to after they click an ad and (3) the funnel they go through to convert (whether that entails buying something or giving you information). Many people make the mistake of only focusing on the first element thinking that they have a website and so long as the traffic gets to it things should work out - this is a bad strategy that can lead to very bad outcomes, even to the conclusion that search isn't working. Just because you get someone who wants to buy to your website doesn't mean they'll find the things they need to feel comfortable doing so. Measuring and optimizing the entire process is crucial to success (and as a side benefit, it sets you up to run all sorts of other types of advertising campaigns) but we have to start somewhere, and since each element is a lot of work, I've broken them up into 3 different articles, I'm sure you can guess which is covered in this post...
Before I start, for the sake of this post, I'm going to assume that you want to manage your own campaign either directly or using someone in your company who doesn't come from a search background. If you have a search expert internally or externally, you may want to move on to part II of these article series.
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Ready to build your search marketing campaign? Let's begin...
So what exactly goes into each of the elements you ask? Let's take a look. Managing a search program involves creating several elements that all centers on pairs of keywords and text. Each of these sets live within a "campaign" which is a group of related ads. Without getting too deep into advanced strategy, you want to keep your campaigns small and very focused. For example, if you're selling scuba diving equipment, you might make a campaign about snorkels, another about regulators and another about tanks - each campaign would then contain different adgroups (sets of keyword and copy pairs) for different parts of those topics. This is more work than just creating one campaign with different ad groups for each topic but it helps the search engine find better relevancy between the adgroups and will help your campaigns be more successful while also making it easier to measure the results of different topics.
Under this scenario, your adgroups would then contain keyword and copy pairs about a particular subtheme of the campaign. Following with the scuba example, your adgroups for the campaign "snorkels" would be for "cheap snorkels", "snorkels", "dry snorkels" and so on. As you can see, while the overall topic is snorkels, there are a lot of subthemes going on that necessitate creating different adgroups. Within each adgroup you will want to place 10-20 keywords and at least 3 ad variations. Using different adgroups is also great as they can be turned on or off in one click allowing you to introduce different tests like a special offer, a seasonal message or just to test a different approach.
Note: These adgroups all could be created as different campaigns to even further improve your separation of topics but that's probably not necessary until you get a much bigger campaign built.
Next you'll need to come up with a list of keywords that relate to your theme. You can research keywords any number of ways - come up with your own ideas, use information from product descriptions, use the tools each engine has to suggest keywords or try an external tool like WordTracker. The idea here is to find related keywords on a very particular theme which people will search for. You can specify if these keywords are broad (meaning if they are used in any form), phrase (meaning they're used closely but not exactly) or exact (meaning the exact keyword is typed in). I generally suggest setting up most keywords as phrase so you get relevant queries with some degree of freedom to account for plurals and the order of words. Sometimes using exact makes sense if you're bidding on very precise terms or words with lots of meaning. I'm rarely a fan of broad myself but you can certainly try them all.
Your keywords will also need to have bids which can start out being for the entire adgroup or keyword by keyword - it's your call but at first going for the whole group is far quicker and after you have some results you can go back and customize based on results. You want your ads to get traction so you can measure results and build up a good reputation by getting lots of clicks so you generally want to start bidding out at a fairly aggressive rate - this is where data really starts to come into play. For example, if you're assuming that an average order will be for $50, your visitors will convert at a reasonable 2.5% and you'll net $25 after product and overhead costs then you could afford to pay $0.62 per click and still break even. Of course you aren't in business to lose money but it's common to start your campaigns at or near a breakeven point and then throttle them down over time. This is done in part to get more learnings but also to show up higher, get a better CTR which factors into your campaign's success, (again I'll explain more on this in a bit).
Note: If you have more than 10-20 keywords per subtheme you'll want to break them out across multiple adgroups - search engines look at the relevancy, performance and relationship within a single keyword to help determine your quality score, an important factor which I'll cover in a bit).
It's also important to create multiple variations in your ad copy to test out different selling points. For example, your first ad group might be about the quality of your snorkels, the second about how fast you ship them and the third might have a discount offer. By having 3 similar but differing offers and selling points you can see which brings in the most traffic and sales - later on you'll want to come back and remove the losing ad while creating a few more possibilities based on what's working. This is optimization.
Finally you'll have to link your bids back to a page - this page is known as your landing page and ideally is a standalone part of your site that relates to the exact product and subtheme your adgroup is for - the more targeted the better. For example, in the dive campaign you'll want to have landing pages for each of the snorkel types - cheap, dry and general. Each of these pages would then contain the general title of the adgroup and products that relate to it. General landing page theory says to keep pages specific, limit the number of options (this includes removing general navigation, competing offers) and give people clear messaging which relates to the ad they saw and tells them where to go next. The more focused and specific your landing pages are the better they perform and the better they help that quality score factor which again I'll explain later. There's a lot more to landing pages but that's the subject of my second part of this series so for now just keep in mind that you'll need to budget in time to create them and optimize them - another thing to consider when you decide to start advertising your website.
As I mentioned a few times, many of the steps you take to create your campaign are a function of quality scores but what exactly does this mean? Well there's a few ways quality scores are used in your campaigns to determine your ad's position on a page as well as your minimum bid. Quality score for ad position are determined a combination of your click through rate which is an indicator of your ad's relevancy, your bid which is your value to the search engine, the relevancy of your keyword to the word being searched for (the closer the match the better of course), historical performance of the entire adgroup and campaign and a few other factors. For your minimum bid, quality score looks at your click through rate for relevancy, the keyword's relationship to your overall adgroup (which is why you want to keep your adgroups to a limited number of similar keywords) as well as the information on your landing page to understand how the ad will really relate to what the person searched for. Each landing page gets a quality score as well. The idea of all these scores is to help ads that are popular and relevant while penalizing those which are less used or seem less beneficial - after all, search engines want people to find the right match. It's not a perfect science by any means but does reward well setup and relevant campaigns which is what you'll have if you spend the time to put things together properly.
For more on this see the Google AdWords FAQ.
This process is repeated for each campaign and adgroups until you have a complete set representing your full offering. There's obviously a lot of strategy that goes into each elements but that's the basics of setting something up. If you scroll down to the end of this document you'll find a few resources that explain more about picking keywords, writing compelling copy, setting up campaigns and some of the other fine details which I've left out of this quick overview.
I'm sure by this point you're wondering how you control how much money you spend. Relax, even though you may have bid a lot and on a lot of keywords, you'll get the option to set limits on each campaign (another reason to keep your campaigns small) as well as in general. You can even fund your accounts on a one-time basis to insure there's only a set amount of money in the account to spend.
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Once you have your campaigns in place you enter the measurement phase. As you'll see each search engine offers similar metrics although they may be presented in slightly different format. This data starts out a very high level showing entire campaigns and continues down to individual keywords and copy listings. For each element you'll see the amount of impressions (how many people saw the ad), the number of clicks (how many people acted), the total cost, the cost per click (what you're actually paying versus what you bid), the average position of the element, and if you have it setup the number of sales and the conversion rate of people clicking an ad to actually ordering. All of this data lets you determine how good each element is doing on its own and as a part of your
On the subject of sales, each of the engines allows you to install a little tracking script on your site to measure conversions and sales if applicable. Unless you have a robust analytics package like Omniture or Webtrends, which can get all your search data right into their system, I'd highly suggest installing this code. Having a single place to view campaign costs and conversions/ sales is extremely useful in measuring performance and optimizing. Installing this code is generally a matter of copy and pasting and shouldn't be a big IT effort at all.
So you have all this data, now what? Well the first step is to identify things that aren't working which means they either aren't getting you any traffic or are costing you money without a profit. This involves looking at each element from the bottom up (don't ever assume that just because a campaign or adgroup is profitable the items it contains are doing fine... one keyword can do great but another may be failing horribly) and gauging success. Since there are multiple elements to the campaign you'll have to address each one generally starting with the ad copy.
If the copy isn't getting clicked that's an indication that you need to come up with new ideas and iterations - this is why you have multiple versions to start with. If you're getting clicks from your copy but no sales from any keywords, the copy might not be "tight enough" that is to say, it may not properly explain your offering and may need to be amended to include a price, a longer product title or anything else which further describes what you offer. This is especially true if you're bidding on keywords with multiple meanings. At the same time the opposite may be true - if you aren't getting sales and feel your products cost a bit more, you may want to try including your benefits whether its better quality, offers like free shipping, or whatever else you feel separates you.
Once you're ok with your copy you'll want to focus on each keyword looking to see what the click thru rate is, if it's bringing in any sales, what the roi is and so forth. Your bids can be adjusted lower if they're bringing traffic but not converting well relative to others but still help contribute sales or increased if you want to increase the traffic or sales from a well converting keyword. Again, look at your keywords as they relate to your ROI and figure out what you're willing to spend. Assuming orders are about the same, a keyword that's converting at 5% is worth spending a lot more on than one converting at 2% but a keyword converting at 2% with an order 3 times higher than one converting at 5% is also much better. It's all a function of ROI and being able to expand while maintaining profit.
Besides copy and bids you also have to pay attention to your quality scores, both for your keywords and your landing pages. If you start to notice forced minimum bids, chances are you aren't getting a high enough score. You can click in and see the score for each keyword and landing page and adjust it by working to make copy people click more (this generally means loosening things up to be broader and/ or increasing offers) as well as improving the information on the page to mention your keywords more closely. Other strategies include using the keyword at least once in the copy and making more landing pages to focus on each theme/ subtheme can also have a big impact.
Of course you don't just want to look at the things that are losing you money - the successful parts of your campaign should also be optimized. Remember all those copy variations you created? Check which ones are winning, try editing or replacing the lesser performers in a champion/ challenger setting (the leading placement is the champion, everything else is a challenger who you are hoping beats the champion... once one copy listing beats the champion with enough data to be relevant, it becomes the champion and so on and so forth). Optimizing good parts of your campaign is how you increase your ROI and sales; be certain to try increasing good bids, experiment with different offers and push things to get more people to your site or less people at a better qualification rate. Testing is the name of the game for this part of the campaign.
Because money can go out the door so fast you'll need - no -- strike that - you have to monitor your campaigns on a continual basis. When you start out monitoring daily is ideal (don't over react to the first few clicks, just monitor things as they build) and over time you can move back to checking once or twice a week if that's all time allows. Ideally you want to get into the habit of tweaking everything not performing as often as the data allows and increasing everything that is performing as often as you can. For someone with limited time, I generally suggest looking at your bad & mediocre campaigns early in the week and then again at the end and your good ones just at the end of the week if time is limited (and it almost always is). This gives you a chance to make changes to the bad stuff and follow up at the end of the week to see if there were improvements while getting to use a whole week's learnings on the good elements.
Note: When you run a small campaign it's tempting to make decisions based on a few clicks. Relax and step back. Search data is like any other piece of data and can swing from good to bar with just a couple of clicks or orders. Ideally you want at least 100 clicks in a small campaign and preferably 100 conversions in a larger one before you make a change. Obviously if 100 clicks is $200 and your entire budget is just that you'll have to act earlier but don't assume you should get a sale after 5 clicks, it's not reasonable. Remember, you're probably aiming for a 2-3% conversion rate on a new campaign which means you'll need at least 50 clicks to reasonably assume you should have had a sale... anything less and you're back to making guesses.
As a final note, there's a lot more advanced features you can try tweaking and testing with your campaigns. For example, you can limit your campaigns to only show up during certain hours or days, which is great for watching a bad campaign that you want to monitor closely or if you feel orders will only happen during certain periods with mostly just "lookers" the rest of the day. You can also change how your bids work, set engines to try and keep you at a certain rank regardless of price, spend all your money as fast as possible or spread it out over time and so forth. I encourage you to look at all of these elements but really focus on the core - keywords, listings and quality scores and tweak those elements over and over again to get the most juice out of your campaign.
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So, as you can see, there's a lot that goes into just the first element of an advertising campaign and depending on how many items or services you offer, your search campaign might consist of dozens if not hundreds of adgroups and copy sets and thousands of keywords. That's a lot to setup and as I've explained several times, it's something you'll have to keep managing day after day for as long as you run it.
If you're worried about going to that extreme that's ok, you can always start with a more limited campaign to test the waters before going "all out". Often times I find businesses do best testing a campaign with themes including their main brand topic (i.e. your name) and a few of your core products, basically the things people know you for. This way you get traffic that's really qualified and probably even knows who you are... and you keep your competitors from snagging your own searchers. As you find success and become more comfortable with your limited campaign you can start branching out into more themes and subthemes.
If all of this is just too much and you really just wanted to spend 15 minutes making an ad and getting on Google thats ok too -- follow the basics, create something small with a limited number of topics and expect to get a few clicks. But as this post should indicate, chances are you won't see huge results and if you don't check back, you may end up burning through your money pretty quickly and with poor results.
But of course getting someone to click is hardly the end of the process, in fact, it's just the beginning. Now you have to get them to stick around long enough to see what it is you offer and to start the buying process. And that something I'll cover in part II of this series...
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Want to learn more about some of the finer points in search? Try these sites:
- AdWords Keywords Suggestion Tool
- 6 SEO Tips to improve your Adwords Quality Score
- 10 Worst AdWords Campaign Management Mistakes
- Optimizing for a content network audience
- 31 Killer Writing AdWords Ads Tips
- 10 Ways To Increase Your Adwords Quality Score
I've been actually having these same issue with respect to PPC value. Specifically, I'm trying to decide the value of someone clicking on your website once.